Vision Egg: an Open-Source Library for Realtime Visual Stimulus Generation

Abstract

Modern computer hardware makes it possible to produce visual stimuli in ways not previously possible. Arbitrary scenes, from traditional sinusoidal gratings to naturalistic 3D scenes can now be specified on a frame-by-frame basis in realtime. A programming library called the Vision Egg that aims to make it easy to take advantage of these innovations. The Vision Egg is a free, open-source library making use of OpenGL and written in the high-level language Python with extensions in C. Careful attention has been paid to the issues of luminance and temporal calibration, and several interfacing techniques to input devices such as mice, movement tracking systems, and digital triggers are discussed. Together, these make the Vision Egg suitable for many psychophysical, electrophysiological, and behavioral experiments. This software is available for free download at visionegg.org